Haiku by Basho

Not spilling the glistening dew,
the bush clover,
undulating

白露をこぼさぬ萩のうねりかな (shiratsuyu wo kobosanu hagi no uneri kana): the white dew it does not spill, the swaying of the bush clover. 萩, hagi, is bush clover, one of the seven grasses of autumn, its long stems bending in wind; 白露 is the white dew of the same season; うねり is the long undulation of a bough; かな closes on the swaying. The poem turns on one restraint: the clover moves, and the dew still does not fall. Bashō wrote it in the autumn of 1693 at his disciple Sanpū's hut in Fukagawa, as an inscription on a painting of his own, over a clover the host had moved to his hedge. It was first printed in 1696 and again in 1698, and the two prints differ by one particle: the poet's own book reads 白露も where the scroll reads 白露を, the text the world has read since, from the eighteenth-century selections to Shiki, who in 1893 called it a perfect rendering of the plant's bearing, to Blyth. Both are texts of his own generation. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.